PAPCZYŃSKI, STANISLAUS

Founder of the marian fathers; b. Podegrodzie, near Stary Sacz, Poland, May 18, 1631; d. Góra Kalwaria, Sept. 17, 1701. His baptismal name was John Baptist. He studied in the Piarist college in Podoliniec (Spicz) and in Jesuit colleges in Lvov and in Rawa Mazowiecka. In 1654 he entered the Piarist novitiate in Podoliniec, receiving the religious name Stanislaus of Jesus-Mary. In 1656, in Warsaw, at the close of his second novitiate combined with a theology course, he took his simple vows and became a subdeacon. In 1661 he was ordained at the Piarist college of Rzeszów. Transferred to Warsaw in 1663, he became renowned as a teacher of eloquence, a preacher, and confessor. In 1669 he was secularized, but in the act of his release from vows and the oath of perseverance in the Piarist Institute on Dec. 2, 1670, he solemnly promised God to continue in the religious life through the "Society of the Marian Clerics of the Immaculate Conception," which he planned to found. This new Marian Congregation received its first ecclesiastical approval in 1673, and he was appointed superior of a small hermitage at Korabiew (Puscza Mariańska), near Zyradów. In 1677 he fixed his residence in Nowa Jerozolima (Góra Kalwaria) near Warsaw and devoted the rest of his life to the government and canonical establishment of the Marians in the strict observance of the Norma Vitae, the constitutions he had written for them. Upon the approval of the Marians by the Holy See in 1701, Papczyński made his solemn profession, and he died a few months later. His body rests in the "Cenacle" Chapel of Góra Kalwaria. His beatification process, begun in 1769, was interrupted in 1775 and resumed in 1953. His principal writings are Prodromus Reginae Artium (Cracow 1669), Templum Dei Mysticum (Cracow 1675), and Norma Vitae (Warsaw 1687).

Bibliography: g. a. navikeviČius, Stanislao di Gesù Maria Papczyński 1631–1701 (Doctoral diss. Gregorian U. Rome 1960). c. krzyŻanowski, Stanislaus a Jesu Maria Papczyński, … Magister studii perfectionis (Rome 1963).

[m. rzeszutek]